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Hitting the target

Target date funds are a popular default option in many retirement plan investment schemes, but are they a good fit for younger, millennial investors? CNBC Senior Personal Finance correspondent Sharon Epperson discusses target date funds with certified financial planners Tim Maurer, of The… Read the rest of the article on CNBC.

Have you committed these investing blunders?

The financial worries that keep Americans up at night run the gamut from cradle to grave: daily expenses, college education, retirement nest eggs. While stressing over the big fiscal picture, many investors easily fall into some costly—but very much avoidable—financial traps. We asked the CNBC Digital Financial Advisor Council to weigh in with some of…

The Cheap Volatility Illusion

ETF

As I write this on Aug. 10, despite all the economic problems facing investors (such as Greece, the slowing Chinese economy, a bear market in Chinese stocks, the collapse in commodity prices and Puerto Rico’s default), the VIX index, a measure of the market’s expectation of 30-day volatility, had closed above 14 only once since…

Don’t Join The China Panic

ETF

It’s not as if investors didn’t already have enough to worry about with the Greek crisis, Puerto Rico’s default, the Iranian nuclear agreement, ISIS, the Fed ending its zero-interest-rate policy in the near future, and gurus such as GMO’s Jeremy Grantham proclaiming that the market is vastly overvalued based on the Shiller CAPE 10 ratio….

The millennial future

Given changes in the jobs market and retirement savings options, how can risk-averse millennial investors in their 20s and 30s secure their futures? CNBC Senior Personal Finance correspondent Sharon Epperson discusses the future for Gen Y workers with certified financial planners Tim Maurer, of The… Read the rest of the article on CNBC.

‘Gurus’ Without A Clue

ETF

In my role as director of research for The BAM Alliance, a community of more than 140 registered investment advisor firms, I’m frequently asked both by clients and other advisors to address the issues raised by market “gurus” who make forecasts in the financial media. These forecasts often create anxiety, so investors naturally ask whether…

Financialization And Commodities

ETF

Slightly more than a decade ago, several studies were published raising the possibility that an allocation to commodities (in the shape of fully collateralized futures) could improve the efficiency of a portfolio due to the diversification benefit (the low to negative correlation of commodities to both stocks and nominal bonds) provided through including this asset…

When it comes to investing, rely on long-term wisdom

When it comes to the market’s peaks and troughs, investors often don’t react as rationally as they might think. In fact, in times of extreme volatility or poor performance, emotions threaten to commandeer our common sense and warp our memory. It’s called recency bias. Recency bias is basically the tendency to think that trends and…

The Carry Trade Defies Theory

ETF

The success of the carry trade strategy has led to its widespread proliferation, despite the fact that it contradicts economic theory. In short, this strategy involves borrowing (going short) a currency with a relatively low interest rate and using the proceeds to purchase (going long) a currency yielding a higher interest rate, capturing the interest…

What Is Our Attention Really Worth?

New York Times

Pay attention! We hear this command a lot, often from parents and teachers. People want to remind us to focus on what we’re doing. But I’ve been thinking about a more literal meaning: paying with our attention. Attention is a currency. We choose how to spend it, just like we spend our time, energy and…

The Meritless Assault on the DOL’s Fiduciary Rule

Huffington Post

The assault on the fiduciary rule proposed by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has intensified. Republicans from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce recently asked Labor Secretary Thomas Perez to “immediately withdraw” the rule. Why? Because they believe it will “reduce investment options and increase costs for retirement savers.” The Financial Industry…

When Bonds Act Like Stocks

ETF

Research into the determinants of fixed-income returns have found that a number of stock and bond market risk factors can be shown to demonstrate explanatory power beyond the standard term-structure variables. Ivelina Pavlova, Ann Marie Hibbert, Joel Barber and Krishnan Dandapani—authors of the paper “Credit Spreads and Regime Shifts,” which appears in the Summer 2015…

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